Europe’s pensions landscape has changed dramatically since the 1990s. This paper tries to assess better the impact of these changes using a broad social sustainability framework. Pension wealth estimates for a variety of hypothetical cases are used to assess the ability of systems to alleviate...

Successive reforms enacted since the 1990s have dramatically changed Europe’s pensions landscape. This paper tries to assess the impact of recent reforms on the ability of systems to alleviate poverty and maintain living standards, using estimates of pension wealth for a number of hypothetical...

We consider a situation where the relatively ‘poor’ are concerned about their relative income status with respect to a relevant reference group. Such a concern is explicitly introduced in a utility function to study the consumption and saving behavior of the poor in terms of a static and...

Most assessments of pension sustainability focus on the projected fall in spending. However interest in the impact on adequacy, usually measured by replacement rates, is increasing. In this paper we show that replacement rates have significant defects, related to being point-in-time indicators...

The existing literature on poverty has discussed about the conflict between income-based measure and nutrition-based measure. However, the role of social inequality in influencing individual’s consumption and inducing greater consumption of the so called status good has been relatively...

The conflict between the income based and nutrition based estimates of poverty is a widely debated issue in economic literature. This paper, using a two commodity framework, attempts to show that in presence of inequality, a status driven utility function can reconcile the conflict between the...

In presence of inequality a status driven utility function reconciles the conflict between income based and nutrition based measures of poverty. Moreover, it can explain why the poor tend to save less, an established empirical fact in the developing countries. The result is independent of the...

Though the main benchmark used to assess pension reforms continues to be the expected resulting fall in future government spending, the impact of policy changes on pension adequacy is increasingly coming to the fore. As yet, there does not seem to be a broad consensus in policymaking circles and...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model where trade has a direct and positive impact on growth rate of two trading nations beyond the level effect. We use the idea of virtual trade in intermediates induced by non- overlapping time zones and show how trade can increase the equilibrium...

Since the 1990s reforms have changed substantially both the nature of state pension provision and the level of generosity. This article tries to assess the impact of these changes using estimates of pension wealth for a number of hypothetical cases. By focusing on all prospective pension...